The End of the End of the Earth Read online

  After the election, Mark Zuckerberg did briefly seem to take responsibility, sort of, for having created the platform of choice for fake news about Clinton, and to suggest that Facebook could become more active in filtering the news. (Good luck with that.) Twitter, for its part, kept its head down. As Trump’s tweeting continued unabated, what could Twitter possibly say? That it was making the world a better place?

  In December, my favorite Santa Cruz radio station, KPIG, began running a fake ad offering counseling services to addicts of Trump-hating tweets and Facebook posts. The following month, a week before Trump’s inauguration, the PEN American Center organized events around the country to reject the assault on free speech that it claimed Trump represented. Although his administration’s travel restrictions did later make it harder for writers from Muslim countries to have their voices heard in the United States, the one bad thing that could not be said of Trump, in January, was that he had in any way curtailed free speech. His lying, bullying tweets were free speech on steroids. PEN itself, just a few years earlier, had given a free-speech award to Twitter, for its self-publicized role in the Arab Spring. The actual result of the Arab Spring had been a retrenchment of autocracy, and Twitter had since revealed itself, in Trump’s hands, to be a platform made to order for autocracy, but the ironies didn’t end there. During the same week in January, progressive American bookstores and authors proposed a boycott of Simon & Schuster for the crime of intending to publish one book by the dismal right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The angriest of the bookstores talked of refusing to stock all titles from S&S, including, presumably, the books of Andrew Solomon, the president of PEN. The talk didn’t end until S&S voided its contract with Yiannopoulos.

  Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons are there to be pushed—students and activists claiming the right to not hear things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them. Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you’re on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate. And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best—the work of Alice Munro, for example—invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

  * * *

  Three years ago, I was in a state of rage about climate change. The Republican Party was continuing to lie about the absence of a scientific consensus on climate—Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection had gone so far as to forbid its employees to write the words climate change, after Florida’s governor, a Republican, insisted that it wasn’t a “true fact”—but I wasn’t much less angry at the left. I’d read a new book by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, in which she assured the reader that, although “time is tight,” we still have ten years to radically remake the global economy and prevent global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Klein’s optimism was touching, but it, too, was a kind of denialism. Even before the election of Donald Trump, there was no evidence to suggest that humanity is capable—politically, psychologically, ethically, economically—of slashing carbon emissions quickly and deeply enough to change everything. Even the European Union, which had taken the early lead on climate, and was fond of lecturing other regions on their irresponsibility, needed only a recession in 2009 to shift its focus to economic growth. Barring a worldwide revolt against free-market capitalism in the next ten years—the scenario that Klein contended could still save us—the most likely rise in temperature this century is on the order of six degrees. We’ll be lucky to avoid a two-degree rise before the year 2030.

  In a polity ever more starkly divided, the truth about global warming was even less convenient to the left than to the right. The right’s denials were odious lies, but at least they were consistent with a certain cold-eyed political realism. The left, having excoriated the right for its intellectual dishonesty and turned climate denialism into a political rallying cry, was now in an impossible position. It had to keep insisting on the truth of climate science while persisting in the fiction that collective world action could stave off the worst of it: that universal acceptance of the facts, which really might have changed everything in 1995, could still change everything. Otherwise, what difference did it make if the Republicans quibbled with the science?

  Because my sympathies were with the left—reducing carbon emissions is vastly better than doing nothing; every half degree helps—I also held it to a higher standard. Denying the dark reality, pretending that the Paris Accord could avert catastrophe, was understandable as a tactic to keep people motivated to reduce emissions; to keep hope alive. As a strategy, though, it did more harm than good. It ceded the ethical high ground, insulted the intelligence of unpersuaded voters (“Really? We still have ten years?”), and precluded frank discussion of how the global community should prepare for drastic changes, and how nations like Bangladesh should be compensated for what nations like the United States have done to them.

  Dishonesty also skewed priorities. In the past twenty years, the environmental movement had become captive to a single issue. Partly out of genuine alarm, partly also because foregrounding human problems was politically less risky—less elitist—than talking about nature, the big environmental NGOs had all invested their political capital in fighting climate change, a problem with a human face. The NGO that particularly enraged me, as a bird lover, was the National Audubon Society, once an uncompromising defender of birds, now a lethargic institution with a very large PR department. In September 2014, with much fanfare, that PR department had announced to the world that climate change was the number-one threat to the birds of North America. The announcement was both narrowly dishonest, because its wording didn’t square with the conclusions of Audubon’s own scientists, and broadly dishonest, because not one single bird death could be directly attributed to human carbon emissions. In 2014, the most serious threats to American birds were habitat loss and outdoor cats. By invoking the buzzword of climate change, Audubon got a lot of attention in the liberal media; another point had been scored against the science-denying right. But it was not at all clear how this helped birds. The only practical effect of Audubon’s announcement, it seemed to me, was to discourage people from addressing the real threats to nature in the present.

  * * *

  I was so angry that I decided that I’d better write an essay. I began with a jeremiad against the National Audubon Society, broadened it into a scornful denunciation of the environmental movement generally, and then started waking up in the night in a panic of remorse and doubt. For the writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was seeing in this one. Why was I excoriating fellow liberals when the denialists were so much worse? The prospect of climate change was every bit as sickening to me as to the groups I was attacking. With every additional degree of global warming, further hundreds of millions of people around the world would suffer. Wasn’t it worth an all-out effort to achieve a reduction of even half of one degree? Wasn’t it obscene to be talking about birds when children in Bangladesh were threatened? Yes, the premise of my essay was that we have an ethical responsibility to other species as well as to our own. But what if that premise was false? And, even if it was true, did I really care personally about biodiversity? Or was I just a privileged white guy who liked to go birding? And not even a pure-hearted birder—a lister!

  After three nights of doubting my character and motives, I called Henry Finder and told him I couldn’t write the piece. I’d done plenty of ranting about climate to my friends and to like-minded conservationists, but it
was like a lot of the ranting that happens online, where you’re protected by the impromptu nature of the writing and by the known friendliness of your audience. Trying to write a finished thing, an essay, had made me aware of the sloppiness of my thinking. It had also enormously increased the risk of shame, because the writing wasn’t casual, and because it was going out to an audience of probably hostile strangers. Following Henry’s admonition (“Therefore”), I’d come to think of the essayist as a firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them. But I had a lot more to fear now than my mother’s disapproval.

  My essay might have stayed abandoned if I hadn’t already clicked a button on Audubon’s website, affirming that, yes, I wanted to join it in fighting climate change. I’d only done this to gather rhetorical ammunition to use against Audubon, but a deluge of direct-mail solicitations had followed from that click. I got at least eight of them in six weeks, all of them asking me to give money, along with a similar deluge in my email in-box. A few days after speaking to Henry, I opened one of the emails and found myself looking at a picture of myself—luckily a flattering image, taken in 2010 for Vogue magazine, which had dressed me up better than I dress myself and posed me in a field with my binoculars, like a birder. The headline of the email was something like “Join Author Jonathan Franzen in Supporting Audubon.” It was true that, a few years earlier, in an interview with Audubon magazine, I’d politely praised the organization, or at least its magazine. But no one had asked for my permission to use my name and image for solicitation. I wasn’t sure the email was even legal.

  A more benign impetus to return to the essay came from Henry. As far as I know, Henry couldn’t care less about birds, but he seemed to see something in my argument that our preoccupation with future catastrophes discourages us from tackling solvable environmental problems in the here and now. In an email to me, he gently suggested that I lose the tone of prophetic scorn. “This piece will be more persuasive,” he wrote in another, “if, ironically, it’s more ambivalent, less polemical. You’re not whaling on folks who want us to pay attention to climate change and emission reductions. But you’re attentive to the costs. To what the discourse pushes to the margins.” Email by email, revision by revision, Henry nudged me toward framing the essay not as a denunciation but as a question: How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end? Much of the final draft was devoted to a pair of well-conceived regional conservation projects, in Peru and Costa Rica, where the world really is being made a better place, not just for wild plants and wild animals but for the Peruvians and Costa Ricans who live there. Work on these projects is personally meaningful, and the benefits are immediate and tangible.

  In writing about the two projects, I hoped that one or two of the big charitable foundations, the ones spending tens of millions of dollars on biodiesel development or on wind farms in Eritrea, might read the piece and consider investing in work that produces tangible results. What I got instead was a missile attack from the liberal silo. I’m not on social media, but my friends reported that I was being called all sorts of names, including “birdbrain” and “climate-change denier.” Tweet-size snippets of my essay, retweeted out of context, made it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican Party, which, by the polarizing logic of online discourse, made me a climate-change denier. In fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope for the ice caps. All I’d denied was that a right-minded international elite, meeting in nice hotels around the world, could stop them from melting. This was my crime against orthodoxy. Climate now has such a lock on the liberal imagination that any attempt to change the conversation—even trying to change it to the epic extinction event that human beings are already creating without the help of climate change—amounts to an offense against religion.

  I did have sympathy for the climate-change professionals who denounced the essay. They’d been working for decades to raise the alarm in America, and they finally had President Obama on board with them; they had the Paris Accord. It was an inopportune time to point out that drastic global warming is already a done deal, and that it seems unlikely that humanity is going to leave any carbon in the ground, given that, even now, not one country in the world has pledged to do it. I also understood the fury of the alternative-energy industry, which is a business like any other. If you allow that renewable-energy projects are only a moderating tactic, unable to reverse the damage that past carbon emissions will continue to do for centuries, it opens the door to other questions about the business. Like, did we really need quite so many windmills? Did they have to be placed in ecologically sensitive areas? And the solar farms in the Mojave Desert—wouldn’t it make more sense to cover the city of Los Angeles with solar panels and spare the open space? Weren’t we sort of destroying the natural world in order to save it? I believe it was an industry blogger who called me a birdbrain.

  As for Audubon, the fund-raising email should have warned me about the character of its management. But I was still surprised by its response to the essay, which was to attack, ad hominem, the person whose name and image it had blithely appropriated two months earlier. My essay had, yes, given Audubon some tough love. I wanted it to cut out the nonsense, stop talking about fifty years from now, and be more aggressive in defending the birds that both it and I love. But apparently all Audubon could see was a threat to its membership numbers and its fund-raising efforts, and so it had to negate me as a person. I’m told the president of Audubon fired off four different salvos at me personally. This is what presidents do now.

  And it worked. Without even reading those salvos—simply from knowing that other people were reading them—I felt ashamed. I felt the way I’d felt in eighth grade, shunned by the crowd and called names that shouldn’t have hurt but did. I wished I’d listened to my panics in the night and kept my opinions to myself. In a state of some anguish, I called up Henry and dumped all my shame and regret on him. He replied, in his barely legible way, that the online response was only weather. “With public opinion,” he said, “there’s weather, and then there’s climate. You’re trying to change the climate, and that takes time.”

  It didn’t matter if I believed this or not. It was enough to feel that one person, Henry, didn’t hate me. I consoled myself with the thought that, although climate is too vast and chaotic for any individual to alter it, the individual can still find meaning in trying to make a difference to one afflicted village, one victim of global injustice. Or to one bird, or one reader. After the online flames had died down, I started hearing privately from conservation workers who shared my frustrations but couldn’t afford to express them. I didn’t hear from many people, but there didn’t have to be many. My feeling in each case was the same: The person I wrote the essay for is you.

  * * *

  But now, two and a half years later, as ice shelves crumble and the Twitter president pulls out of the Paris Accord, I’m not so sure. Now I can admit to myself that I didn’t write the essay just to hearten a few conservationists and deflect some charitable dollars to better causes. I really did want to change the climate. I still do. I share, with the very people my essay criticized, the recognition that global warming is the issue of our time, perhaps the biggest issue in all of human history. Every one of us is now in the position of the indigenous Americans when the Europeans arrived with guns and smallpox: our world is poised to change vastly, unpredictably, and mostly for the worse. I don’t have any hope that we can stop the change from coming. My only hope is that we can accept the reality in time to prepare for it humanely, and my only faith is that facing it honestly, however painful this may be, is better than denying it.

  If I were writing the essay today, I might say all this. The mirror of the essay, as it was published, reflected an angry bird-loving misfit who thinks he’s smarter than the crowd. That character may be me, but it’s not th
e whole me, and a better essay would have reflected that. In a better essay, I might still have given Audubon the rebuke it deserved, but I would have found my way to more sympathy for the other people I was angry at: for the climate activists, who for twenty years had watched their path to victory narrow sickeningly, as carbon emissions mounted and the necessary emissions-reduction targets grew ever more unrealistic, and for the alternative-energy workers who had families to feed and were trying to see beyond petroleum, and for the environmental NGOs that thought they’d finally found an issue that could wake the world up, and for the leftists who, as neoliberalism and its technologies reduced the electorate to individual consumers, saw climate change as the last strong argument for collectivism. I would especially have tried to remember all the people who need more hope in their lives than a depressive pessimist does, the people for whom the prospect of a hot, calamity-filled future is unbearably sad and frightening, and who can be forgiven for not wanting to think about it. I would have kept revising.

  MANHATTAN 1981

  My girlfriend, V, and I were finishing college, with a summer to burn before the next thing, and New York beckoned. V went up to the city and signed a three-month lease on the apartment of a Columbia student, Bobby Atkins, who may have been the son of the creator of the Atkins Diet, or maybe we just enjoyed imagining that he was. His place, on the southwest corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam, had two small bedrooms and was irremediably filthy. We arrived in June with a fifth of Tanqueray, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella Hazan’s Italian cookbook. Someone had left behind a spineless black plush-toy panther, manufactured in Korea, which we liberated and made ours.